I used to dress up as Alex from A Clockwork Orange and spend every Halloween drinking White Russians and calling them Moloko-Plus, but I lost the costume during a move and have decided to just skip Halloween every year because it's just easier. Now my favorite part of the holiday is the half-priced candy at the stores on November 1st. I'll certainly be at the C-Town across from my place the next morning buying all of the peanut butter cups that remain!

What have you worked on lately that you're proud of?

I have finally perfected my recipe for Lavender & Ginger cookies. I'm pretty proud of that. It took a while, changing this and that in successive batches--I had to eat hundreds of delicious but somehow inferior cookies to come up with this final recipe. I can't tell you what's in them but I can say that halfway through the baking I pull the cookies out and garnish them with a slice of candied ginger that sort of melts melts on top. The purple flakes of lavender in the cookie play off the yellow bits of candied ginger--it's the kind of cookie that you eat with your eyes first.

What can people expect from your reading?

Thinly veiled autobiography. Very thinly veiled.

What's your favorite scary movie?

My favorite scary movie is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. It's about a lonesome female vampire wandering around an Iranian ghost-town. It's a new movie but it was shot in black and white, and the characters speak Persian, but it isn't hard to follow--really you could watch it with no subtitles and still know most of what's going on.